January 7, 2003

By David Fear

MANY YEARS AGO , when I was granted tenure in the proletarian film school known as "Video Store Clerkdom," a customer with a Saxon-inflected accent approached the counter and asked a fellow drone for a recommendation on "a good German film from the last few years." My coworker stared at the man for a beat, then snorted, "Isn't that an oxymoron?" before he turned back to his menial task. The man, frustrated, walked away.

Somehow, German cinema had garnered a bad rap throughout much of the '80s and '90s. After the delights of das neue Kino in the early '70s, contemporary German films almost dropped off the American radar entirely; sleeper hits such as 1981's Das Boot were the rare exception to the rule. Distributive cold feet plus the general misconception that Deutschland's directors still made nothing but humorless epics full of crumbling buildings and angst meant that even as many worthy works flourished, few were being called, and even fewer chosen.

One hotshot kino brat and one photogenic fräulien eventually changed public perception on this side of the pond. Her name was Lola; she was a runner ... with Manic Panic in her hair and an iconic starlet stare. Even as Run, Lola, Run's runaway success opened up global export potential for much of the country's output, critic Olaf Moller had accused its director, Tom Tykwer, of tainting Germany's homegrown crop with his fast-paced, cut-and-slash aesthetic. Afterward films had to conform to the Lola sound-and-fury model or risk obscurity, which caused many filmmakers to abandon their "German-ness" and treat their films as mere sausage skins stuffed with borrowed tricks. Tinseltown's blockbuster "best" made up the meat of their motherland's cinematic wurst.

One of the consistent pleasures of the annual "Berlin and Beyond" film festival is that it allows those who live on these shores to get an update on Germany's filmic state. Full of new works that feel like they're the country's wheat and chaff, the festival makes for a real zeitgeist taste test. While Tykwer's pervasive influence over today's Young Turks is debatable, it's hard not to see various strains of America's persuasive entertainment paradigms reflected back through a lens dankly.

Take, for example, longtime festival favorite and last year's tribute recipient Doris Dörrie's latest film Nackt (Naked), a huge box-office hit in Germany. Despite the presence of Benno Furtman, the actor with the matinee-idol good looks and Easter Island mug from Tykwer's The Princess and the Warrior, you'd be hard-pressed to find a trace of Tykwer's influence on Dörrie's trademark feathery, farcical style. Yet her story of three couples neck-deep in floundering relationships and bourgeoisie envy who test romantic bonds with a risqué parlor game (see title) puts its attractive thirtysomething cast through their Albee-lite paces with all the sense and sensibility of a must-see sitcom; call it the pilot for Schaden-Friends. Then there's Tattoo, a decidedly un-Teutonic take on the serial-killer genre wherein a rookie cop pairs with a jaded homicide officer to track down a body-art collector with a penchant for skinning. Gratuitous crane shots, slick zoom-pans, vogue nihilism chic ... How do you say "Se7en" in German?

But the festival does not live on pop cinema tourism alone; the real glory of "Berlin and Beyond" has always been the contrast of audience-friendly flicks with tougher, tastier alternatives that bear witness to a true national voice. Ulrich Köhler's Bungalow, the winner of this year's Best First Feature award, follows a 19-year-old soldier (Lennie Burmeister) who inexplicably deserts his unit and heads home to his parents' house in the south. He spends his days lounging around their pool, lying to his brother, and picking up on his brother's Danish girlfriend (Trine Dyrholm). Meanwhile, M.P.s begin to show up in search of the MIA private. Köhler sets the stage for a slow-motion derailment from the get-go, maintaining the illusion that very little is happening while the hero's world crumbles at a snail's pace around him. The high dread factor and paint-drying speed may put some off, but those willing to stick it out are rewarded with one poetic version of purgatory and a final mise-en-scène that would make Béla Tarr beam.

And then there's Dog Days, which literally and figuratively satisfies that "Beyond" criteria to a T. Stitching together vignettes of flabby grotesques, numbed sex addicts, and the world's most annoying hitchhiker, Austria's budding enfant terrible Ulrich Seidl presents a season in hell, masked as a simmering summer week in the suburbs. His documentary-style theater of pain is a particularly unflinching one; by the time a character speaks the film's last line ("People can be so cruel ..."), one is tempted to think the director might be the cruelest of them all. Dog Days may feel like two hours trapped inside a Bosch painting, but Seidl's knack for laying bare the brutal and the banal easily makes this the feel-bad movie of the year. You couldn't ask for better proof that, smart-ass video store employees be damned, Germany and its sister countries are still major players on the world cinema stage. Not that they ever left, really. But thanks to the festival, we get the full picture for one week out of the year.